Hello, m'am, I'd like to get your opinons on . . .
It was sad but when I moved to Atlanta I had to get a job. Not that I hadn't had them before. I became someone's employee right after dropping out of college. Warehouse toter, night auditor, warehouse again. And again. One warehouse job lasted one day. I'd asked if the warehouse was this busy most days. I was fired for complaining.
I did apply to work in a stroke clinic. But after being hired it only took five seconds reflection to know that I wasn't tough or brutish enough for the job.
I tried telephone soliciting. I may have lasted a week. Trying it a second time I silently left during the first day's lunch break. It was worse than the first. You had a script and not a jot or tittle of deviation was allowed.
I worked in a decent new bookstore in downtown Atlanta. The boss, Mr. Joe Huey, was of the petty tyrant school. Wanting you doing something even in nothing needed doing. I'd thought a perk of working in a bookstore would be getting to read. I did when he wasn't around. Nothing memorable. Some very tame gay pornography called Greenleaf Classics I think. (I was a virgin and needed an instruction manual.)
I was a gopher at Atlanta Journal. That left no memories. Don't even know why I quit.
For a goodly stretch I delivered architectural blueprints. Most of the other guys were pretty lazy. One day my back felt so bad I couldn't stand up long enough to wash a few dishes. That told me my destiny lay elsewhere.
Then I stumbled into market research. For the Gallup people. It wasn't the famous part that does the political polling. But I did get a badge saying The Gallup Poll. That was a big help. My first assignment was pasting advertisements for Fram windshield wipers into copies of Time. It was door-to-door, tiring, time consuming and boring.
For a lady who worked out of her house but did well enough to drive a Lincoln Continental I did a survey of architect's libraries. No one in the architect's offices wanted to be bothered. I threw the survey in the trash but claimed I'd done it and mailed it in. They paid me anyway. And asked that I re-do the survey. My roommates told her that I'd been run over by a garbage truck.
Eventually I became a telephone interviewer at Darden Research across from the campus of Emory University.
Clairborne Darden was a good ol' boy. Self-consciously so: drove racecars, smoked cigars. His family was wealthy but he'd put himself through college selling coffee to students. And he was very strict about how the how the office coffee was made. It was merely Maxwell House but the portions of water and coffee had to be just right.
If good ol' boy means something other than upper-middle class or wealthy redneck I've missed the distinction. If they like you they can be very handy to know. It was Claiborne's family connections that got me out of jail in Eden, NC. In a moment of low moral tone I'd tried to cash someone else's stock dividend check at a branch of NCNB. Claiborne made a call and the charges were dropped.
I have a good phone voice and while I couldn't talk people into buying resort property I could be ingratiating enough to get plenty of folks to give me 10 to 60 minutes of their time. I was very good at it.
Some bank was one of Claiborne major clients. So I asked folks about their 'banking habits.' Almost none of it was memorable enough to remember. I do recall asking people about automated tellers which were new back then. Many people, particularly older people were afraid to use them. First National of Atlanta thought to overcome this by giving their ATMs a name. Tillie the All-Time Teller had a big smiling, feminine face painted on her, uh, it. Luckily for those of who use ATMs this didn't catch on.
He was an easy guy to work for. He was competent. Working for someone who doesn't know what they are doing is awful. The questionnaires were well designed and concise. He new he was good at what he did. To the point of arrogance. But that didn't bother me. I tried working for people who didn't know what they were doing.
Market research interviewers were sub-contractor which means that the employer doesn't have to mess with taxes or social security. You have to square things with the Feds (nowadays called work-for-hire I think). Fine with me. I never made enough to pay taxes.
I was hired on a per project basis. A survey could last a couple of days or a month. Handily enough you could choose which four hour shifts you wanted to work. You could even work 12 hours a day. Since there was no overtime, nobody cared. I got along with Claiborne fairly well and he'd sometimes give me odd jobs to do when he didn't have a survey going.
Once I'd done a survey a few times I'd go on auto-pilot. I didn't know what I was saying while I was saying it.
I remember a survey where men were given free underwear. We called them back to ask them how it fit into the greater scheme of boxers and briefs. They guys that got called by female interviewers were so embarrassed you could hear the blushes over the phone. We laughed at them mercilessly.
I remember doing a survey for Cruex crotch spray but can't remember a funny story.
Moving to San Francisco the second time all I had to do was turn the Yellow Pages to Market Research and I had a job.
First place was Far West Research. My first evening there I turned in a good sized stack of correctly executed interviews but apologized for my poor performance. Dont' know why I was so calculating. But they bought it. So I got plenty of work from them.
They did the local McDonald's tracking survey every month. Mostly we asked people which fast food jointed they went to and why. Kentucky Fried Chicken and Wendy's were the places people went to because they liked the food. McDonalds' scored high in consistency and convenient location.
I also worked for a mess called Public Sector. It was run by a programmer who'd bought a mini-computer. He had the business and personal skills of a possum. They bragged they could do everything in house. They could but they never could do it well.
Their surveys were the worst written that I ever read. In quizzing members of college activities committees we infelicitously asked "What activities are you active in?" Adlibbing is a grave sin in opinion research but there wasn't any choice with junk like that.
Their main bread and butter accounts were Levi-Strauss and The Gap. I've sometimes wondered if the Public Sector contributed to the diminished success of Levi's jeans.
The company always veered between disequilibrium and raging chaos. The supervisor Pam was nice and did what she could which was little. I worked there as rarely as possible.
Soon I didn't have to. In a snit, Lori, the supervisor at Far West quit. I wrote Clifford Levy, the owner a letter telling him why he should hire me. He had only cavil, I'd used the phrase "operative necessity." Who could blame him? Sounded like unindicted co-conspirator John Dean. Partly in thanks to him what I write now is readable.
So I was the Field Services Director, a grand title meaning that I merely handled a bunch of interviewers. Almost all of it was your usual stuff: popcorn taste testing, and, and - damnifiknow.
We did do some political work. In one survey I talked the client into adding bisexual to "Are you straight or gay?" I was a gay man who had suddenly found himself in love with a woman. I also hoped it might diminish the frisson of the question. Probably not needed in San Francisco.
After about a year I grew weary of SF. Siobhan and I moved to New York. She worked as a telephone interviewer there. I didn't want to get back on the phone. But by Manhattan standards I didn't have much in the way of qualifications. The only job I got was coding (preparing the interviews for computer keypunch operators).
I was hitherto ignorant of colostomy bags. This was a queasy making survey. I remember the poor fellow whose bag fell off in a crowded elevator. And the man who wanted the bags to come in different colors. To match his underwear perhaps.
I eventually wound up back in San Francisco. And applied at Far West to get my old job back. Cliff offered me less than I'd been making two years before. At least he consented to give me my old salary. I resented this and he would pay.
Siobhan, Gordon and I were tired of big city life. Having visited Chapel Hill I knew this part of North Carolina had a portion of the urban amenities. It wasn't like moving to the sticks.
The day we were to move I went into the office as usual. At noon I told an interviewer that I was going to lunch and would be back. We got into Gordon's Toyota and the three of us in trailer in tow started out.
We also didn't tell our other roommate that we were leaving. I'll write about here sometime.
In Chapel Hill I went to work for a couple of used bookshops. After a few months of that I opened my own. Don't work for anybody else anymore.